A shadow was laying on the firmament, so gossamer-thin as to be weightless, but pervasive and effective, winding its way into where it wanted to go and what it wanted to do on levels below both mind and spirit. It covered everything in my local view, reaching out towards the stars themselves in the distance with the most gossamer of threads that would stretch forever, but not break.

Some of those threads had been sent towards Terra, but they all led back here.

-I need an absolute termination order and mandatory vivisizing of all aliens teleported onto Terra during this last day. This is an Omega Code on High Guard authority.-

I had never invoked the Omega Code. There was just no reason for me to do so. What it meant was that we were dealing with a cosmic entity with malicious interests in Terra, and there was to be no question, something had to happen Right Now to stop it.

Thirty seconds later, every alien who’d been teleported onto Terra was dead and burning vivic. The little threads extending galaxies away towards Terra vanished.

-Keep your Cosmic Awareness away from me.- Minds starting to reach out in my direction pulled back abruptly. -I’ll give you a feed, do NOT attempt to survey this until you see it.-

I dumped it onto everyone interested who could understand it, which was a pretty select group of people.

Whistles and soft curses echoed in the Markspace. There was an ominous feeling in my backbrain, and I became aware that Ben Parker was actually sharing this with Galactus, who was studying it with great interest.

-There is something nasty and subtle inside that planet,- Briggs /murmured for everyone. -Why in Hell’s Bells did it pick out Terra to mess with?-

-The River of Human Destiny,- Ben Parker /said softly. -It went seeking something grand and powerful to latch onto and corrupt, and basically caught the flow of Fate itself. It is seeking to expand outside that galaxy to a proper feeding ground.-

-It’s feeding on Fate?- I /asked for clarification, as I sent my view down into my Pact.

Eight Red Eyes suddenly opened around my head. Only Agamotto’s Eyes being active here allowed me to perceive them.

I could feel a very unmistakable sense of hunger and anticipation coming back up along the Pact.

-If you Principals want a closer look, these spells need to be taken up another notch,- I /muttered softly.

There was a moment of consternation, and then a feeling came, like something had just plucked at the corner of a web, and their spells unwound and rewound, tighter, yet looser, even more profound in their intentions and power.

I could feel the mental hissing at the feat, as well as the awed eagerness to examine the results. None of the trio had been around long at all compared to a Weaver, after all. Like, blink your eye and gone, in comparison.

-The Widow in the Web has found some prey,- I /murmured, and suddenly had the unmistakable intuition that not only was this one of the reasons I had been brought here, but tying me to Fate and then arranging for so much power on so many levels was bending circumstances so that I was at least as responsible for this whole series of events happening as Briggs forming the River of Destiny like he had in the first place.

After all, the threads of bent Fate I left behind could be woven, followed, and integrated, whereas the stuff Briggs and Sama did were either immovable or invisible...

Clenching my teeth, I noted that the entirety of my cosmic energy and Ultra Core output was being used to sustain the upgraded spells. That was probably not an accident, as the energy of the nega-bands seemed to be on the opposite side of the paradigm this energy operated from, and so was ‘invisible.’

Layers of tools, indeed...

-I’m going in for a closer look.- My, wouldn’t this be interesting. -Morgan, contact Grandfather Anasazi about this.- The Red Eyes around me all turned to glare at me angrily. “Oh, shut up. You know I can’t handle this by myself, and neither can you. I can tell just by your active intervention that this is a big fat morsel you don’t want to get away. Your fellow Weavers are going to know who’s responsible, and even if you have to share the kill, you know what’s more important to you.”

The pitiless Red Eyes studied me, and somehow looking aloof and proud without changing an iota, turned back to watch as I closed back in on the prison planet.

------

I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was feeding on the Sins of the prisoners here, and their collective influence on Fate, wrapping it up and using it to push and pull the once-enlightened Federation that dominated this galaxy, guiding it towards decay and a darker road. A road of glory turned from the path and heading towards ruination by the gentlest of influences across time and space, their Fate stolen and used to feed... whatever was inside here.

I could sense the moment the other Weavers found out. Suddenly every single star in the sky felt like a lidless, open eye turned this way, and the twinkles of starlight like the beginning of subtle webs ready to be deployed in every direction.

Circe, Morgan, Nimue, and Dealer all popped up outside this solar system, forming the basis of a four-sided pyramid. They might not have had the Pact, but that hardly meant the Weavers couldn’t reach out and touch them. They were all Twenty-Ones, so they could get the patterns into place, even if they couldn’t bring up the Underweb and power the whole thing.

Something woven of the shadows between stars, the moments between moonlight, and words before sound began to grow explosively outside the system, and Weavers wove their webs...

---

Despite the locus of Evil swirling here, nobody was dying. The thing below didn’t want any of these murderers dying, because they were its mortal levers, ever more of them arriving to help it manipulate the civilizations beyond, weighing on their reasons and ideals while denying them resolution.

I found a deep spot, a geothermal well driven into the depths that was not truly a well at all. What was wafting out of there was cold, dark, and wispy, not heat.

Space was created out of nowhere between the vapors, vanished behind me as I moved down. The levels of power here were well into the cosmic range, at least on a par with a Highfather, and growing towards the level of a Celestial.

A fat bug, indeed...

I paused abruptly. There was no warning or flaring of Awareness, but my gut told me that I could not advance an inch further without attracting attention I did not want. I drifted back, staring down into a miasma of shadows between darkness, the congealed force of the influence beyond, in my own little traveling pocket of space between the dimensions here, spun out of nothing and reducing to the same, not even stretching the Veil at all.

---

Deep in the Underweb, at the center of the Weft of Worlds, Grandfather Anasazi smiled an unkind smile, and a leg that could extend across the multiverse set down on a thread there.

---

There was a pulse and an opening in the mists for a moment. It took me a moment to realize the scale, and then I realized the twitching was the end of a tendril the size of Manhattan, and I had to pour my Reserve energy into reinforcing my mind to withstand looking at this thing as the mists cleared up, and I could finally behold it.

Somewhere between a millipede and an octopus, with countless eyes looking in every direction that its shadows extended in, including beyond this reality, and ahead and back in time and space. That it was watching the Underweb was also a given, for it had just responded to Grandfather Anasazi twitching a part of the Underweb half a universe away.

That thread led to nothing near here, of course. Instead, a dying star two galaxies over began the process of collapsing into a nova.

Shadows swirled, and the thing was lost behind vagaries of impossibilities once again.

I could tell the Weavers knew what it was, as the directions they were giving Dealer and the others became much more explicit and direct. The four couldn’t understand the what and why of what they were doing, but they were more than adept enough to do it with the exacting precision needed regardless.

The difference between Skill Ranks and Skill Modifiers, as it were.

There was no hurry on this. The Weavers were endlessly patient and thorough, and unsurprisingly it seemed they had done this before. Fate-Eaters, eh... Aberrants. What mystics here called the ‘Many-Angled Ones’. Things from outside Eternity, feeding on parts of it, what we called creatures of Mythos.

Was pretty sure this thing wasn’t finite in the real sense, using the mass and reality of the planet to conceal its presence within Eternity, like a virus hiding inside a cell and corrupting it like a slow, subtle cancer.

I backed out and away from the prison and retreated into orbit, looking over everything.

The thing’s Awareness was spread through its subshadow mist, so I couldn’t affect anything real here without it sensing it, which was rather grating...

I did know what my job was, however. At the moment the web closed, I had to supercharge it with the Underweb, and trap this sucker hard. Then, I was pretty sure the Weavers were going to spin it into a cocoon of proto-quanta, drag it into the Underweb, and all its stolen Fate was going to be leeched out of it very painfully.

So, I sat there in orbit as the other four wove a spell that needed to encompass an entire solar system, doing nothing but watching, Cosmic and Core power fueling concealment and awareness, being patient as I let my Marktell links go passive, no more talking.

Sitting there, watching.

------

It took a full twelve hours to get the massive spell set up. I could tell the Weavers were absolutely delighted at the speed. Probably not used to employing Casters with Caster Levels beyond 50, and that was without the Sublime Chord helping them speed things along, as plucking at the magic so blatantly would have been sure to alert this thing.

They did look askew at the crimson of the Chaos magic attaching to the spell from Morgan, but hey, Scarlet Sorceress Supreme, deal with it. All it did was make the spell even more impossible for this Aberrant thing to sense...

Threads touched together, integrated flawlessly. Touch after touch, leaving no gaps, no openings to squeeze through, a combined Spellcraft and Concentration check in the 100ish area, something even the Weavers themselves could respect. We might not understand WHAT we were doing, but execution was what Warcasters did best, and Concentration was totally our thing.

Full and complete by even the exacting standards of the Weavers, the web began to shrink.

It collapsed on its target faster than the speed of light, whispering past the subshadows of its awareness, gathering while keeping its integrity.

I pictured the nodes of it and the superhumanly-drawn Seals and Compounded Rune Structures, building up into one another that made up this spell, and I reached down into the Underweb there, there, there, and there, anchoring them to my arms and legs. The Nodes converged towards this planet, right towards the density where it might sense something happening, and the points of contact.

There.

Now.